There is compelling evidence that organized, structured activities during the out-of-school hours play a valuable and a highly valued role in the lives of the nation's young people, but low-income and minority families are far more likely to be dissatisfied with the quality, affordability and availability of options in their communities. This…

This book offers lively, creative ideas to develop children's curiosity while helping them build the skills needed to succeed in kindergarten and beyond while meeting standards and benchmarks. "Play, Projects and Preschool Standards" has won the Distinguished Achievement Award for "Best Teacher Resource" in the professional…

Find out how environmental print can be used as an instructional literacy tool in the kindergarten classroom. This book: (1) Describes games, activities, and centers that use environmental print; (2) Shows how to use environmental print to create a curriculum and assess students print awareness and sight word vocabulary; and (3) Gives…

Survival Guide for the Beginning Speech-Language Pathologist, Second Edition will guide you when taking your first clinical steps toward a career as a speech-language pathologist. Graduate and undergraduate students, as well as beginning therapists, will find this book useful and easy-to-understand. It provides realistic, practical, and…

This final report describes activities and accomplishments of a federally supported project in Connecticut to develop and examine the effectiveness of a social competence curriculum on the behavioral outcomes of young children (24-48 months) with disabilities and their families. Children (n=17) and their families received two years of…

This booklet compiles 30 papers selected from presentations at "Play in a Changing Society: Research, Design, and Application," the fifth triennial national conference of the American Association for the Child's Right to Play. The papers are grouped into five sections; each section contains an introduction to the papers. The sections…

Distributed by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services, this pamphlet provides parents with information and advice about their infants in the seventh month of life. Following a brief description of developmental characteristics at this age, the pamphlet offers advice on a variety of topics, including: your…

In this report we present preliminary results of a study on the relationship between informal out-of-school and formal in-school mathematics and the ways each can inform the other in the development of new mathematical knowledge, in this case concerning computation in base 12, 24 or 60. This study is based on a teaching experiment involving a…

There has been relatively little social science research on the influence of religious beliefs and practices on fathering. This study examined narrative accounts obtained through in-depth interviews from 16 Mormon fathers of children with special needs in the context of Mormon religious belief and practice, research on stress and special needs…

While other developmental theories, on a smaller scale, share center stage with Piagetian theory, Jean Piaget will likely be remembered as one of the world's leading psychologists of the twentieth century. This book, with a first version published nearly 20 years ago, attempts to make Piaget's concepts more "user friendly" for those…

This paper examines Lev Vygotsky's theory concerning the zone of proximal development (ZPD) in children and its relevance to early childhood education. As per Vygotsky's "Mind in Society" (1978), ZPD is the difference between a child's "actual development level as determined by independent problem solving" and the…

This book is a compilation of discussions on current issues in play therapy. It is designed to help therapists fill in the gaps about working with special populations, which is often not directly addressed in other play therapy resources. The object of the book is to bring together information related to issues and dynamics of the process of this…

Caring for infants and toddlers has long been conceptualized in Western society as mothers' work, and consequently devalued. Alternative care for infants and toddlers has lacked a knowledge base like that undergirding preschool education. Factors impeding research on infant/toddler care include strong ideological opposition to nonmaternal care,…

Young children's curiosity about nature and their need to make sense of the world presents an opportunity to incorporate science as a natural and critical part of children's early learning. This guide, part of a preschool science curriculum, uses an inquiry approach to encourage young naturalists to observe life more closely, build an…

This guide was developed for North Carolina teachers in early childhood education and focuses on how play-based center activities in kindergarten teach literacy, mathematics, science, social studies, and the arts. Development of the guide was based on educators' experiences and their understanding of how children learn. The guide's introduction…